Milan Kundera

Both fascism and comedy take life very, very lightly. That's the essential insight that has defined the novels of Milan Kundera, the renowned Czech author who turned 86 this year — the way that governments and jokes, in pursuit of their own ends, so easily lose track of the individual, and at the same time the stubborn desire of the individual not to be lost track of, to go on existing. It makes tragedy comic, and comedy tragic: fatalism becoming stoicism, until perhaps it becomes heroism. It's a philosophy that suggests how it must feel to exist, as Kundera did for many years, under a government that is not a protector but a threat, "an invisible, incorporeal,...

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Both fascism and comedy take life very, very lightly. That's the essential insight that has defined the novels of Milan Kundera, the renowned Czech author who turned 86 this year — the way that governments and jokes, in pursuit of their own ends, so...

Fin Dolan aspires to something meaningful, but he can't put his finger on what it might be. He is chronically unattached, generally the smartest person in the room, and employed by a New York media company that offers endless opportunities for mockery....

Michael Henry Heim, a literary translator and humble philanthropist whose teaching, activism and widely admired translations of works by such writers as Günter Grass and Milan Kundera helped bring the voices of contemporary world literature into...